Prologue
...the face of the 2/-2 card, the total is eight, twelve. Change the face of the...
He had met her in the Pazaak Bar, though few women there seemed very interested in him. She was a welcome change from the endless stream of girls who were only interested in his Pazaak deck or in the credit chips he had accumulated that night.
She sat next to him as he started another game, quietly sipping at a Correlian whiskey, eyes watching his hands shuffle through the cards, as his mind's deck shuffled through his head.
He was as good at memorizing cards as he was at memorizing faces. A few games lost were never lost to him. The cards they played were filed away in the back of his mind, and those players who never changed their sidedecks couldn't understand why they continued to lose.
But still, there were others, those who had simply been dealt a better deck than he could ever afford. He bore no animosity against them for it. He learned to use their strength as a weakness. Their overreliance on their decks made winning easy once several straight ties forced them to relinquish their cards. From then on out, it was all luck.
And luck tended to favor Atton.
... 3/-3 card, the total is fifteen, nine. Change the face of the 1/-1 card, the total...
His face changed as often as his pazaak cards, an endless stream of facades drawn from a thick deck.
He was a talented actor, and it made him an even better assassin. No matter what tools he had at his disposal, emotion was always his weapon of choice. It channeled through his body like an energy, crude and raw, deceiving his opponents, all the while acting as a barrier against their Jedi attacks. Desperation, lust, anger, love--they all had their own purposes. He was simply better at using them than most.
Killing Jedi was easy, it just took intelligence. But breaking them--that was harder. It was always easier to bring the sith a dead body than it was to bring a live captive. But he loved breaking them the most, and through trial and error, he learned the best ways to defeat them. He played with their compassion for other beings. He shot at innocent bystanders, he attacked naive padawan.
His unreasonable actions clouded their judgement. Their compassion made them weak. They behaved rashly, because they were emotional atrophied. When they felt that sudden rush of emotion for the first time, they knew no way to control it. When they acted, they acted out of anger and it brought them closer to the precipice of light and dark.
And pushing them over that ledge was his favorite part of the game.
...is sixteen, fourteen. Change the face of the 4/-4 card, the total is...
He shoved her against the wall, large, calloused palms pressing against pale, slender shoulders. She did not resist as he thought she would, and she relented to the man's firm grasp, his wandering hands.
He had many women before. Women he had won over with charismatic smiles or with credits. Women like him, who were using him as much as he was using them. Then, there were the Jedi.
He loved fucking them the best.
"Jaq," she whispered, her lips dangerously close to his neck, breath hot on his ear. "I know who you are." Another warm breath trailed up his neck. "I've come to save you."
Twenty.
The game was over.
He felt her crawl into his brain, penetrating the defenses he had struggled so long to fortify. And as she pierced through the walls, he scrambled to rebuild them, but it was too late.
The memories poured from him, memories he struggled to forget over games of Pazaak and shots of Juma. They had been buried deep within his mind, but her intrusion brought them closer to the surface. But even despite this, he struggled to keep them grounded, burying them deep beneath waves of forced emotion.
The connection opened, and as the gates in his mind's fortress were penetrated, so were hers.